How 90Pixel improved their Academy candidate recruitment and selection process with Patika

About 90Pixel

90pixel is a team that offers digital solutions with the spirit of startup. It produces not only code, but also products, especially for education technologies and education sector.

90Pixel Academy

90Pixel Academy is a three-month internship program supported by a full education and experience prepared for candidates who want to be a part of 90Pixel team. This helps the team recruit the best talent and create a give-back culture in the company.

Traditionally, the Academy process from application to graduation is as follows:

• Application
• Case study
• Interview
• Admission
• 3-month training
• Live project experience
• Graduation

The challenges in this process were:

1. High amount of time that is allocated from 90Pixel senior developers to trainings
2. Limited data to evaluate hundreds of applicants and find the best-fits to 90Pixel

We designed a process that allows 90Pixel to evaluate candidates better while minimizing time spent for trainings.

In the re-designed Academy process, we put trainings before acceptance and provided contents on Patika.dev online learning platform while supporting candidates on our Discord server. Thus, 90Pixel could evaluate candidates through their one-month learning curves; and 90Pixel senior developers didn’t spend any time for trainings.  

The new process of the Academy became:

• Application: 200+ participants participated in the program.
• Online training on Patika.dev supported by Discord community: All participants started taking Node.js and React.js courses and on Patika.dev at their own pace. We created a Discord server spesific to 90Pixel to provide community support to the learners. Patika and 90Pixel teams joined the server for networking, learning together, answering questions, and monitoring participants’ progress. We reported weekly progress of each participant on Patika.dev to 90Pixel.
• Case study: At the end, those who could make great progress on Patika.dev online courses were asked to complete a case study.
• Interview
• Admission and live project experience
• Graduation
  

After training, we sent 90Pixel a shortlist of 15 candidates for each technology (Node.js and React.js). 90Pixel team evaluated their learning progress, case quality, motivation for the program, and interaction with others on Discord. At the end of the interviews, the participants of 90Pixel Academy 2021 (4 people for frontend, 4 people for backend) were ready!

Some participant comments and a screenshot of their interactions on the Discord channel are below:

“It was an amazing experience working together, discussing, socializing with hundreds of developers on Discord. We shared our ideas and developed new projects together. I will never forget this one month.”

“With the help of this program, I have learnt Node.js and started an internship at 90Pixel. It was an amazing one month. Thank you very much:)”

“I have improved myself a lot by doing different projects here. The biggest benefit of this program was to support our technical skills continously with a lot of homeworks and projects on Patika.dev!”

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Thanks to new design, 90Pixel Academy could provide training to many more people than they would do otherwise; and they selected more and better candidates thanks to seeing their real performance before admitting them.